A piece of the famous Halley's comet likely slammed into Earth in A.D. 536, blasting so much dust into the atmosphere that the planet cooled considerably, a new study suggests.

This dramatic climate shift is linked to drought and famine around the world, which may have made humanity more susceptible to "Justinian's plague" in A.D. 541-542 - the first recorded emergence of the Black Death in Europe.

The new results come from an analysis of Greenland ice that was laid down between A.D. 533 and 540. The ice cores record large amounts of atmospheric dust during this seven-year period, not all of it originating on Earth.

"I have all this extraterrestrial stuff in my ice core," study leader Dallas Abbott, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told LiveScience here last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Certain characteristics, such as high levels of tin, identify a comet as the origin of the alien dust, Abbott said. And the stuff was deposited during the Northern Hemisphere spring, suggesting that it came from the Eta Aquarid meteor shower - material shed by Halley's comet that Earth plows through every April-May.

The Eta Aquarid dust may be responsible for a period of mild cooling in 533, Abbott said, but it alone cannot explain the global dimming event of 536-537, during which the planet may have cooled by as much as 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). For that, something more dramatic is required.

Ice core data record evidence of a volcanic eruption in 536, but it almost certainly wasn't big enough to change the climate so dramatically, Abbott said.

"There was, I think, a small volcanic effect," she said. "But I think the major thing is that something hit the ocean."

She and her colleagues have found circumstantial evidence of such an impact. The Greenland ice cores contain fossils of tiny tropical marine organisms - specifically, certain species of diatoms and silicoflagellates.

An extraterrestrial impact in the tropical ocean likely blasted these little low-latitude organisms all the way to chilly Greenland, researchers said. And Abbott believes the object responsible was once a piece of Halley's comet.

Halley zooms by Earth once every 76 years or so. It appeared in Earth's skies in A.D. 530 and was astonishingly bright at the time, Abbott said. (In fact, observations of Halley's comet go way back, with research suggesting the ancient Greeks saw the comet streaking across their skies in 466 B.C.)

"Of the two brightest apparitions of Comet Halley, one of them is in 530," Abbott said. "Comets are normally these dirty snowballs, but when they're breaking up or they're shedding lots of debris, then that outer layer of dark stuff goes away, and so the comet looks brighter."

It's unclear where exactly the putative comet chunk hit Earth or how big it was, she added. However, a 2004 study estimated that a comet fragment just 2,000 feet (600 meters) wide could have caused the 536-537 cooling event if it exploded in the atmosphere and its constituent dust were spread evenly around the globe.

To this should be added the Tuscarora “myth” of the contest of the four “wizards”, an account of a small impact tsunami. They lost their fourth division, leaving three remaining.And that should show up in the geology of coastal North Carolina.

Knowing it All is an affliction that has crippled investigation into reality since the imposition of theological thought control many hundreds of years ago.

It's a hard habit to break.

Questions as to what might have been will continue -- legitimately -- until a far higher standard of "proof" is reached than is the case even with such recent events as the assassinations of the Kennedies and 9/11.

The older I get, and the more I read, the more I see "science" posing as the gatekeeper of reality, pronouncing judgement upon what can and cannot be, the more it strikes me as something out of Monte Python only without the humor.

"Proof" is the shakiest of all concepts -- and the one most routinely abused by people with axes to grind.

The Einstein crowd has "proven" that the universe can not be operating along electrical lines. Yet their space-probe predictions keep crashing and burning while the Electric Universe peoples' keep panning out.

neither Western Europe nor Roman Civilization were "wiped out?" Or does that just kind of hyperbole just go with the lunatic fringers?

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.

neither Western Europe nor Roman Civilization were "wiped out?" Or does that just kind of hyperbole just go with the lunatic fringers?

Actually, I think Justinian's military ventures in Italy and other Western Empire areas did almost as much to "wipe out" people as his namesake plague.

You are correct, the west was not "wiped out", but most Roman cities were trashed and seriously depopulated by the mid 6th century. Then along comes Islam in North Africa resulting in the Mediterranean becoming a pirate's paradise ... and marine trade declined by over 90%. The economies of the Western Empire tanked, but Justinian's military forays and plague represented only a couple of the causes.

Since you're on it, I think this would be a good opportunity to point out that the "enlightenment"'s legacy of Proof obsession is keeping you conveniently oblivious to any other way of assessing reality (which is nothing if not complex and messy. So much so that whenever motion is introduced in quantum mechanics, it comes apart at the seams).

Try it this way : Comets have so often appeared in conjunction with / in close temporal association with natural disasters and disastrous human responses to them as to be proverbial harbingers of social and ecological cataclysm.

You have an exactly analogous example in the statistical relation of long-term exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke and lung cancer. Statistically, there is no valid correlation. Period. Claims to the contrary are junk "science" of the Global Warming variety. Yet there is that nagging association between them that, while statistically insignificant (non-causal), is there more often than random chance would allow.

cog, min, you are both right. But there is nothing like global climate collapse to lead to global problems, such as the collapse of the "Hopewell" tribal federations.Then we come to the problem of exactly what caused it.

I hope you enjoy my little essay. You will probably enjoy Key's and Baillie's books as well.

Usually people believe what they want to believe until reality intrudes.

cog, min, you are both right. But there is nothing like global climate collapse to lead to global problems, such as the collapse of the "Hopewell" tribal federations.Then we come to the problem of exactly what caused it.

EP, my impression all along was that the dust veiling was caused by cometary debris. There was definitely a global climate collapse at that time and, as you know, a shortage of food often leads to immunological stress in populations with resultant pandemics being all the rage. The mid 6th Century in Constantinople and Europe was a "perfect storm" of disasters. Ultimately, those populations were reduced by about one-half.

Last edited by Cognito on Wed Dec 25, 2013 3:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.

On October 7, 2013, the Nordic Orion bulk carrier ship completed its journey from Vancouver, Canada, to Pori, Finland, having traveled northward around Alaska and through the Northwest Passage. It was the first large commercial freighter ever to make the voyage through these typically ice-covered Arctic waters.

Ships always used to sail through the fucking Arctic!

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.

Thanks, Min. I was initially fooled by Michael Mann's hockey stick graph when it was published ... until I started looking at the raw data. Further, there has been no appreciable warming in over the last 17 years worldwide even though CO2 has continued its steady climb ... so what's all the fuss?

What the Northwest Passage geniuses fail to mention about the Artic is the following, inconvenient fact: There is now twice as much ice in the Arctic this season as there was at the end of last season. What does that prove? Simply that climate is variable and that 'global warming' is nothing more than our emergence from the Little Ice Age. It's normal, folks.

As a heretic, I am convinced that the Sun plays a major role in driving earth's climate with CO2's impact being negligible. Been telling my kids for over a decade to get ready for cooler weather since we are at least headed into a Dalton Minimum.

So there was a spike c 1997-8 but to claim that negates global warming since then ignores the fact that there has been a fairly steady climb since 1979...which is as early as this chart goes.

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.

A Chinese icebreaker ship is making its way through dense pack-ice just off the coast of Cape de la Motte in Antarctica, where a ship of scientists and members of the public have been trapped since Christmas Day.

The vessel, the Xue Long, and a French icebreaker, the Astrolabe, reached the edge of the ice pack, around 13 nautical miles from the Russian-operated MV Akademik Shokalskiy, just before 7pm New Zealand time (6am GMT) on Friday.

The Xue Long started cutting through the ice soon after, and has made steady, but slow, progress since and is now within sight of the stricken vessel. The ice it has encountered at the edge has been much thicker than expected – 3-4 metres thick in some places. It is travelling at between 0.1 to 3 knots depending on the density of the ice and should reach the Shokalskiy some time in the next 12 hours. The Astrolabe has not yet entered the ice field.

Mortimer said the ice conditions around the Shokalskiy were extremely difficult. When the ship became trapped in ice earlier this week, it was only 2 miles from the open water. Since then the ice sheet has grown and the ship is now more than 13 miles from the sea.

So there was a spike c 1997-8 but to claim that negates global warming since then ignores the fact that there has been a fairly steady climb since 1979...which is as early as this chart goes.

That's not what I'm saying. I am stating the following:

(1) The world is experience a mild warming while emerging from the Little Ice Age (a natural cycle).(2) There has been no appreciable warming since 1998 (revision: actually, it looks more like 2003 from the combined data).

There is no data basis for believing that the earth will endure catastrophic global warming over the next hundred years. CO2 is a relatively weak greenhouse gas and will not create such an effect.

I agree with your comment that we should be cautious about dumping increasing levels of CO2 into the atmosphere, but who's going to stop India or China? Actually, I'm more concerned about toxics dumped into the atmosphere as opposed to a chemical that enhances plant growth. Besides, if the United States scales back its economy to reduce CO2 emissions, the overall effect on the planet will be minimal ... other than feeling good about accomplishing squat.

CO2 levels have been far, far higher in earth's history without calamitous effects other than the need to dodge huge carnivores:

By the way, during the late Ordovician Period CO2 concentrations were over 4,000ppm, but the earth was colder than it is today. According to the conventional greenhouse gas theory, our planet should have overheated. Hmmm ...